Promoting academic engagement among minority youth: implications from John Ogbu’s Shaker Heights ethnography

Abstract

This article offers analysis and critique of John Ogbu’s last ethnography, titled Black American students in an affluent suburb, in which he described a set of community forces contributing to the academic disengagement of African American youth. Its purposes are threefold: first, to briefly layout Ogbu’s findings; second, to compare these to findings emerging from the author’s current research on school factors that promote and impede success in school for working‐class and migrant students of Mexican descent; and third, to point to ways in which Ogbu, by his almost singular attention to the role of community forces, discounted the power of school factors – both as barriers to achievement and as forces for promoting school engagement and academic success. The article concludes with a discussion of the policy implications that flow from Ogbu’s analysis, as well as the author’s research.

Acknowledgments

The research discussed here was made possible through generous grants from the Spencer Foundation (MG #199900129) and the US Department of Education/OERI (#R305T990174). My heartfelt thanks go to all the students, staff and parents from Hillside High School who contributed to this work. Although I am the sole author of this article, the fieldwork and analysis described herein reflect the significant contributions of other members of the Peers Project research team. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the contributions of Livier Bejínez, Clayton Hurd and Cony Rolón. I wish also to express my gratitude to Kevin Foster and to the anonymous reviewers who offered insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. As a condition of gaining access to confidential student records and personal information about the Hillside High students and their families, all study participants were promised anonymity. Accordingly, all names, including the name of the high school and the school district, are pseudonyms.

2. Hillside High findings come from a range of sources including student transcripts and other school records; students surveys; newspaper clippings; extensive participant observation at the high school field site over the four years of the project, including in the office of the Migrant Education Program (MEP), in classes, in extracurricular activities and simply hanging out with students during lunch and after school; interviews with individual students and small groups of students; interviews with teachers and other school personnel, including all MEP staff members; and interviews with more than two dozen migrant parents.

3. This estimate is based on the median family income for the Appleton census tracts with the highest concentrations of Mexican‐descent families (US Census, 2000b) and on data provided by the Regional Director of the Migrant Education Program regarding the average earnings of migrant workers (personal communication, July 23, 2002).

4. Other scholars have challenged Ogbu’s conclusion that African American youth equate ‘being smart’ in class with ‘acting white’ (see for example, Akom, 2003; Carter, in press).

5. Based on survey data collected from Class of 2002 students in both ninth and eleventh grades.